It is November 25 today. While the calendars show that it is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), does not hesitate to bring forward one of their indispensable weapons. Turkey was shaken last Thursday by a motion that can well be qualified as “a code of abuse”. Probably because AKP did not consider it necessary to deal with the severe protest, the motion is now back at the Commission.
Flouting the law and apathy for human rights are the basis of AKP’s behavioral norms, and institutionalization of misogyny and violence on the basis of gender are not accessory to that basis, but its building blocks.
The loop AKP has thrown women can be seen by anyone but the blind. Women have been killed and raped, little girls have been forced to marry. Women’s labor has been usurped, they were forced to wash their hands of professional life, codes have been enacted for this end. So much so that, flexible working, which targets the working class as a whole, was put on the agenda by making women both an instrument and victims, as if it were a legal right women needed.
Meanwhile, some public service ads were shot, “highbrow” bourgeois signed the Manifesto of Equality in Labor at a meeting which involved Mustafa Koç and his wife, Caroline Koç, and Ayşenur İslam, the Minister of Family and Social Policies of the time, took part in the same meeting.
So, was the case really that there were those awkward public ads and Ayşenur İslam at one hand, and Caroline Koç, who speaks several languages fluently, with her courteous and contemplative attitude, at the other? Was it really that the first two were AKP’s populism, and the latter serious and intimate? When a woman was killed, vacated, left up against the wall, and sentenced to every kind of violence as she became helpless, which one felt the sorrow? Or was it neither?
AKP IS POPULIST, BUT HOW ABOUT MRS. KOÇ?
In 2005, the factory of İzmir Chintz Industries, which belonged to Caroline Koç, was shut down on the plea of conditions of competition, leaving 300 workers unemployed, and they were told that only 60% of their severance pay would be paid. When the workers took the case to the court, the district court and the Supreme Court recognized Mrs. Koç’s bankruptcy resolve. The same serious, courteous, and contemplative Mrs. Koç did not look much bankrupt when she was selling silk sheets and embroidered towels for excessive prices in her store in an upscale neighborhood in İstanbul.
One of the workers of İzmir Chintz Industries, holding a bill that reads “Deforcement of rights is robbery”
How many of those women was able to find another job right away is unknown. Perhaps some of them were planning to divorce their husbands who committed violence against them and to found another life, and perhaps some were dreaming of leaving their parents’ house, where they were suppressed continually… right until Mrs. Koç bankrupted and became unable to pay them their severance pays.
Another story is from Yapı Kredi Bank, which joined in with Koç Holding in 2005. A woman who worked at the department that sells credit cards was told by her supervisor: “You have to make concessions to some things. You know what I mean, you are a woman, after all.”
Mobbing, was it? Well, the world of highbrow bourgeois is not very unfamiliar with it. In the sector of banking, an illicit way of earnings, they did not abstain from having an illicit attitude towards a woman.
Let us now talk about 52 workers who were fired because they were members of DİSK/Gıda-İş (Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions/Union of Workers of Food Industry). The same Koç Group that was praised when they opened their Divan Hotel’s doors fort the protesters during Gezi Park Protests did not even care about Divan’s workers who held protests in front of the hotel. One of the workers stated: “Even one of the woman workers who has to breastfeed her baby is forced to overwork with the threat of getting fired.” Apparently the Koç Group did think like AKP: If a woman is to breastfeed, and breastfeeding causes the boss to lose even a bit of their profit, the woman should not work. A corporation that has grown with a rate of 683% with the AKP between the years 2003 and 2013, reaching a profit of 13.4 billion lira, should of course qualify to be in agreement with the government.
In the same date range, 4.819 women who attempted to free themselves from pressure were killed by men under the peaceful shade of the government and the bourgeois, and this is no coincidence. Those who held the gun might be husbands, lovers, or ex-partners, but before that, all of these women were tumbled and left powerless by mobbing, being forced to make a choice between profession and motherhood, and with the liability to conceal abuse. Murderers of thousands of women cannot be men with broken hearts or anger management issues only.
If we do not see those who raise the hitmen, pat their back, enact law special to them, and leave women powerless, unorganized, and weak, how far are we from the sensitive troubled who partly see them?
When we consider Vuslat Doğan Sabancı who went to support Sudanese women who were sentenced to lash because they had worn trousers, should we see an ally of women who went to Sudan after getting vaccinated, or a cruel boss who kicked hundreds of press worker women to the curb? Should we ignore the fact that TEB (Turkish Economy Bank), who takes pride in giving women direct credit, saying, “We stand a guarantor of women”, forced a 4-year-employee to resign in order to avoid paying her severance pay, and look for the song that plays in the background in one of the bank’s ads on YouTube?
We must repel the basis that renders women helpless, that isolates and objectifies them, that alienates them for life. If we can’t, we won’t be any different from those who entreat in the face of tyranny, and we will be calmed by our occasionally-raising voice. But we should dare, not settle, in the face of the gun fired in the shade of Koç, Doğan, Çalık, and Erdoğan.
CAN WOMEN LIVE IN THE USA AND RUSSIA?
Women’s right to live is not a hopeful case in the world. Since the struggle for equality and freedom became feeble, more women have been killed, abused, excluded from professional life, and forced to feel the crushing power of the economic violence. If the socialist Russia flashes before your eyes with Tereshkova, or little girls at ballet course, doesn’t the Russia of cruel monopolies do so with Putin on a horse with his violent and half-naked masculinity, or with women made objects of a vulgar market?
Since the beginning of the 1990’s, the two thirds of the unemployed population in Russia has consisted of women. Women are paid 33% to 50% less than men. It has been years since the attainment of equal payment to equal work was lost, which had been solved by socialism with its first enactments. 36.000 women are subjected to violence by their partners every day. 50% of the married women state that they are subjected to violence by their husbands, and 23% say that they were raped by their husbands. According to a survey, 70% of the participants think that “there is no rape in marriage”. The time of stay of the women who apply to a women’s shelter is only 2 months. Natalia Pazdnikova*, the director of a shelter, states: “We help them in the framework of the law, and support them. Then it is the woman’s responsibility what to do afterwards.” As can be seen, a violence victim woman in the capitalist Russia had better to get herself together and be able to take care of herself.
A Russian deputy says: “A man governed by his hormones is a leader and warrior, while woman leaders are scarce. Men are good leaders, it is their nature. And women are assistants.”** The political figures of the capitalist Russia do not refrain from stomping on Tereshkova, or on the women who fought fascism. 14.000 women are killed in the same Russia annually.
It is not a secret that women are no different in the USA. In the facile presidential elections, the loser of the stage play was Hillary Clinton. As known, against misogynist Trump, Clinton was declared a women’s rightist, and was supported by many representatives of equal pay in Hollywood. The weird thing was that the great interest of American women’s rightists in Ezidi women, who were also targeted by ISIS, stood next to favor for Clinton. In the world where people were worrisome about the violence against women but also starry-eyed, Clinton was neither responsible for the bloodshed in Middle-East, nor the cause of the Islamists who enslaved Ezidi women. As if the USA, where working women who are not paid in maternity leave or in allowance to take care of their relatives with serious diseases did not belong to Clinton, but to anonymous villains.
In California, which is a state won by Clinton, a woman is raped in every 56 minutes. In the country where at least 3 women are killed every day, 10% of the murders occur in Texas, where Trump won. It must be seen clearly that the USA, the country that carries war and poverty to world’s peoples, can provide its own women with life neither in Trump’s presence, nor in Clinton’s, who is now a figure in the past.
If a kick hits a woman going home from work in public transport in Turkey, a black working woman is targeted by the bullet of a police officer, and a Russian working woman who was raised with the legacy of socialism is run down by those whose morality should be a matter of debate.
The depression of capitalism, its chaos, the world it deforms and consumes each and every day does not let women live.
Who should we blame now, then? Whose base should we demolish, and whose halo should we wipe off?
A SHORT REMINDER
Three sisters in the Dominican Republic, Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa Mirabal were raped and killed by the soldiers of the dictatorship of Trujillo in November 25, 1960.
Trujillo expressed his fear against the sisters, who were the founders and personnel cadre of the Clandestine movement against the dictatorship, as follows: “The two greatest threats to the country are the Church, and those sisters.” The murder of the Mirabals sparked off severe reactions in the country, and after the resistance building up, the dictatorship was destroyed in 1 year.
In the meeting of the Congress of the Latin American and Caribbean Women in Bogota in 1981, the day of the death of the Mirabal sisters was declared the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The declaration was recognized by the United Nations in 1999.
* http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21474931
** http://www.omct.org/files/2004/07/2409/eng_2003_08_russia.pdf
